


The Smallest Answer in the World

by bluebloodbruise



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, M/M, POV John Watson, Sorry no Mary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-17
Updated: 2016-08-17
Packaged: 2018-08-09 10:59:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7799137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebloodbruise/pseuds/bluebloodbruise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The first word you learn how to say is 'no.'</p><p>And then you met a man you couldn’t say no to."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Smallest Answer in the World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weeesi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weeesi/gifts), [causidicus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/causidicus/gifts), [quietasasleepingarmy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietasasleepingarmy/gifts).



> This is for the writers I have read recently who inspired me with their insight into John's pain, upbringing, anger, frustration, love. It made me want to step inside his skin for one night. This is the result. Thank you for being such talented, giving writers.
> 
> @bluebloodbruise on Tumblr

1.

The first word you learn how to say is “no.” You are eighteen months old. From then on out, you keep repeating it as your default response. When girlfriends asked if you were too tired to talk, colleagues asked if you were too busy to do overtime, or your father asked you if you had enough, you said no, always no, eyes heavy with sleep, hands aching with formaldehyde, your nose full with blood. No. There was as much pride as anger in forming the smallest answer in the world. You went through your childhood and a good part of your adult life digging a moat around you one “no” at a time, until you imagined yourself a cushioned war zone, armed in invisible barbed wire. Nobody could tell. Nobody could smell the bitterness in your hair, taste the pain in your shoulders. You carried it anonymously in a sort of defiant parade rest. Much like your past memories of broken bones and foul iodine applied behind rotten sheds, you preempted hurt by saying “no” to it. “You cannot have me,” you repeated time and time again, “you cannot win me over.” You smiled in the mirror, even when your mouth reflected back thinned lips, dried out with loneliness, even as you said “no” to the darkest, dreamiest plan of simply walking out to the streets, into the rain, and off a tall building, you held on steadfast and said “no,” the word echoing through years and years of wise decision-making, of dissolved engagements, and strained relations, you said “no” and straightened out your back wishing resolve could be made snug enough to fit in the smallest answer in the world, the largest fear in your body. 

It was a dreary winter day, but you walked out into the streets anyway, into the rain and off to a jaunt in the park, feeling uprighted by the certainty that in your refusal you were whole. And then you met a man you couldn’t say no to.

He spoke too fast, his sentences like a car-crash, words rear-ended and smashed together in endless strings of clinging metal and wheezing iron, painful to a point with his breathlessness. You realized with almost the same velocity as he employed to dress you down that it was not his voice nor his speech pattern that arrested you but the absolute stillness in his eyes. For someone so frenetic, so manically in motion, his eyes were incredibly removed, absent even, though it took you much longer to pinpoint you were drawn to this, not due to some incongruous curiosity, but because it was familiar. He was just like you, a man of refusal, deprivation, and denial. He may not have said “no” to others very often, but he did say “no” to himself all the time. This was the kind of man you couldn’t refuse, you realized as you lent him your phone, exactly because he had made himself already impossible. So you lingered by his side, bewitched and bothered in equal parts, waiting for the moment when you could finally find the drawbridge into his inner moat, secretly hoping that would be the turning point you’d regain a measure of control. He was sly though, constantly manufacturing questions and situations where you could get away with partial denials, while trying to goad you into simple admissions. He should have known better. He was brilliant, after all. Maybe you weren’t able to rebuff him but you’d also never be so foolish as to blatantly acquiesce to him. And so, for almost two years, you said nothing.

2.

When he was gone, it dawned on you that you still spoke to him in the halted negatives you’d so carefully used before he himself had become a negation—the un-alive, the not-here, the negative space all around you. You visited his grave periodically and brought him flowers although you both disliked ritual and melancholy. You did it though, in spite of the cellophaned marigolds making your hands hurt and your eyes water and your nose clog as if full with caked blood, you pushed through it all and dispensed with “don’t” and “can’t” and “won’t”, the closest you came to saying ‘no” to him, but really, those were all “yeses” tentatively masquerading as detachment and progress, and if he had been there you’re sure he would have seen through the words so quickly, that those were the half-truths you came up with when “don’t be dead” papered over “come back to me,” the closest you ever wanted to come to admit to yourself “I can’t live without you.” That in itself was probably a sort of slanted negation come to think of it, you mused for a moment standing in the muggy autumn heat, the ground around his grave wet and still upturned, and as you nodded at the grief-stricken horizon, sick and queasy, you thought, “No, you cannot have me. I’m done,” and pivoted away abruptly, the decision sealed as a pact between you, the sleek headstone, and the dead man beneath. 

When he suddenly returned, a ghost in the flesh, you thought you finally had found that long-awaited opportunity to turn him down. It seemed childishly naive, with hindsight, how desperately you had clung to the belief that if you refused him you’d be free from him, from those slippery, nervy aftershocks he kept plugging into you. You imagined that’s what he thought unsanctioned sentiment felt like and, to be honest, you partook in his visceral distaste of it. You didn’t like these feelings either. You wanted them gone. But when he was gone, they were all the more pressing, if lifeless, greying like dead matter, browning around the corners with the lack of oxygen. So you were in love with him. Fine. You had always been, you knew this before the fall, before the grave, before the pact. You had no saying in it and that made you say “no” all the more fiercely. These were dragonfly thoughts, however, shimmering in the edges of your perception until the day you cracked his nose with your forehead in a mockery of affirmative intimacy, and then clarity mushroomed through and you saw it searingly bright. You loved him but loving him made you as defenseless as it made you small in a bone-deep loneliness you simply could not survive. Nobody could. Nobody could survive the negation of completion, the refusal of belonging. And if you let yourself love him, one-sided as it would certainly be, you would be left stripped and adrift: no longer protected by a whiplash of “nos”, laid bare by an unrequited “yes”—that, that would be akin to defeat, a declaration of surrender. No no no, he wouldn't get that out of you too, not after ribbons and ribbons of grief, and guilt, and regret. No. You stayed your ground, dug your heels in the gravel, held on tight to the wedding band weighing on your damaged hand. You loved him, you buried him deep, the dead man beneath. 

3.

Shortly after the divorce (forty-three hours and twelve minutes, including the time it took you to travel across town), you meet in an unassuming coffee house—his request, not yours. He speaks lowly but adamantly, brooking no argument although you are barely listening and his voice is remote and mechanic, the type of strain you catch on recorded messages in answering machines. He has chosen these words, you realize—they are delivered in the unstoppable monotone of school recitations and spelling bees. The familiarity in his body, always too awkward to sit properly still, but graceful enough to fill a room, resonate with something wiry inside you, and it is that, more than anything he has prepared to say, that makes you realize you are still in love, years after the last time you let yourself be alone with him. You know it because you cannot persuade your gaze to turn away from the twitch in his left hand worrying the insides of his coat pocket, the screeching sound of his spoon swirling sugar into the mug although it has been fifteen minutes and his coffee must have grown cold and syrupy by now. You know you still love him because disappointment and deceit have hardened you so much that you no longer have the need to utter “no” these days. People’s questions wither on their lips when they look at you, the sleet in your gait sparing having to hurt their feelings or turn them away. Not that he would cotton on or bristle at your detachment. He invented aloofness and got armored in it long before you came along. And yet there’s unmistakable warmth blossoming inside you at the sight of his fine-boned hands shaking around the clay mug, the slight hitch in his voice when he leans away to toss his hair, accidentally nudging the waitress as she scoots behind him with two trays of chips. You should bask in some version of self-righteousness, of scintillating victory, as he, in no uncertain terms, mentions making concessions for “civil unions” and “rings” if that is the sort of thing that pleases you. His is a daunting kind of beauty in the dusky summer light, a man in a bespoke suit surrounded by baristas in ill-fitting uniforms and mismatched colored furniture. The thought comes to you with an eerie sort of weightlessness as if finally, finally, you can allow yourself to relent to what makes him lovable: his odd beauty, his massive intellect, his endless reserves for surprise and hurt and commitment and new knowledge. You have never loved him as much as you do in that intense moment of abandonment and remoteness, when he stares at you expectantly, drumming fingers, patience never a strong suit, his eyes immensely full and so very young. And perhaps because you stop wanting so badly to deny him, to fight him off, it becomes so easy to do so. You look straight into his beautifully anxious face and say “no.” "No?," he echoes, physically taken aback, his shoulders slumped in a folded shape that reminds you of when you broke his nose years and years ago. A storm is about to blast outside, you can see it brewing through the bay windows, raw and fraught clouds gathering behind his tilted head. You get up and walk straight into it, so decidedly you forget your coat draped on the empty chair. You keep moving through the punishing rain. You don’t go back for it. You don’t go back at all. 

\------------

Sometimes you dream of having taken him up on his absurd proposal, accepting to resume divorced life with a ghost for a husband. You wake up with a start, disoriented about your surroundings, but by breakfast you are chuckling into your tea, thinking how preposterous it is of him to love you, almost as much as it is of you to love him back, a man that cannot die, the man you buried. It takes you almost a year to accommodate the dreams into your routine of work, occasional long walks, and a new-found interest in botany. You do not have a green thumb but you manage a small indoor garden composed mainly of annual herbs and perennial plants. Nothing dies there. Nothing dies when you touch it. He does not try to see you, not after you’ve left him in the measly coffee house and trudged home across town through a summer thunderstorm. He does send you bouquets of marigolds, shrink-wrapped crookedly, as if done in a haste. Occasionally he slips a forget-me-not or a single red rose in there and you know, the same way he does, that there’s a code tapped quietly into this exchange, thick with memories and confessions and apologies. You know. You put the flowers in water and place them in the back room, far away so you can’t witness them wilt and perish. Eventually he sends them so frequently you have to leave some bouquets in the main room. It first takes you by surprise that the buds don’t seem to fade very easily. When you touch the last batch, it amazes you to discover that, lifelike as they may seem, petals, stems, and corollas are actually sculptured out of paper, plexiglass, and fabric. Of course he had learnt quilling. Leave it up to a man with a restless mind and a flair for the dramatic to take up Victorian handcrafts as a means to make a point. You run your thumb through the perfectly shaped purple forget-me-not, unable to stop yourself from conceding amazement. From then on out, you stop worrying about death and clean water. 

4.

It is spring when you see him again, and no amount of explaining will ever make you believe it was accidental. He has simply tired of waiting. You haven’t. But you never will. You now thrive on skirting away from any source of scorching excitement and closeness. You enjoy depriving yourself of any stimulation, being liquid, amber, sugary, salty, sweaty, or dangerous. The iciness of your anger has at last melted into calcified exhaustion. Age caught up with you in a way that can only happen to people who got in too deep—thoroughly spent and precociously worn. He looks taller, though, reclining in a park bench like if it was a concert hall and he was about to deliver the performance of his life. It’s been eight years since you first met him, but every time you unexpectedly run into him it is always a bit like being introduced to a stranger. You fall in love with him all over again, as much as you are flung back to a state of complete unknowingness and unease. You don’t trust him. You don’t like him all that much either. But here he is, and there you are, so you sit down next to him, unable to speak because you don’t want to betray any conflicting emotions nor disturb established boundaries. You realize you likely fear to retroactively discontinue the narrative in place—yours, his, the one begun when you were eighteen months of age. You fear unraveling the very fabric of time. He knows this for probably much longer than you do, and that knowledge probably also sheltered him from your multiple rebuttals across the years: the spoken and the muffled, the oblique as the explicit. His eyes are so very bright in the May morning, as if lit by the impending start of a new adventure, and he is breathing all too fast, as fast as he used to speak, only now there is a silvery undercurrent of laughter, a delighted smugness in his drawl as he asks “how are the flowers doing?” You refuse to reply so he stretches his arm on the back of the bench almost touching your shoulders—almost—and you push away to stare at the children running up Primrose Hill, screaming yes yes yes to the adult with the kite about to be released into the open limpid skies. He is still humming with laughter when you lean cautiously back, letting his fingers curl around your bad shoulder. He gathers you close, pressing you flush together, forearm to knee and suddenly you can smell his hair, his skin, his body. It smells liquid, amber, sugary, salty, sweaty, dangerous. There’s something infinitely resolute about his gentleness, the way he drums short but decisive taps into your body. It takes you longer, much longer than the hour spent sitting silently in the park, to decipher yet another elaborately coded message from him. It was in Morse this time. It spelled “say yes say yes” over and over again, in a loop so bold it threatened to defy infinity. The message got engraved in your bones while you two looked ahead, following the rainbow-spangled kite fly up and up into the sun, determined, ever so brave, and apparently free.

**Author's Note:**

> Meaning of flowers:
> 
> Marigolds: despair and grief over the loss of love, sacred offerings to the Gods, remembrance, cruelty, and jealousy. 
> 
> Forget-me-nots: true and undying love, remembrance during partings, a connection that lasts through time, fidelity and loyalty in a relationship, despite separation or other challenges, reminders of your favorite memories or time together with another person.
> 
> "Red roses: given to those who you want to show love and passion, people who you have great respect for, and those who have shown great courage. The quantity can also have a special meaning. A single red rose shows love."


End file.
